Life expectancy in Tibet nearly doubled over last six decades: white paper

BEIJING, July 11 (Xinhua) -- Thanks to improvement in medical services over the past six decades, average life expectancy in Tibet jumped from 35.5 to 67 years by the end of 2010, says a white paper issued by the Chinese government on Monday.

The death rate of women in childbirth dropped from 5,000 per 100,000 to 174.78 per 100,000, and the infant mortality rate from 430 per thousand to 20.69 per thousand, according to the white paper titled "Sixty Years Since Peaceful Liberation of Tibet", issued by the Information Office of the State Council.

It says that before the peaceful liberation in 1951, there were only three small, shabby government-run institutions of Tibetan medicine and a small number of private clinics, with less than 100 medical workers altogether.

But by the end of 2010 there were 1,352 medical institutions of all types and at all levels in Tibet, with 8,838 hospital beds and 9,983 medical workers, according to the white paper.

Population in Tibet tripled to 3 million since 1951, with ethnic Tibetans accounting for 90.48 percent, according to China's sixth national census.

Improvement has also been seen in education.

The enrollment rate for school-age children was less than 2 percent and illiteracy rate was as high as 95 percent among the young and the middle-aged in 1951, the document says.

Sixty years later, the enrollment rate for primary school-age children of the Tibetan ethnic group has reached 99.2 percent and the illiteracy rate among the young and the middle-aged has fallen to 1.2 percent, according to the white paper.